A Comparative Study Of Multimodal Metaphor And Metonymy In Chinese And American Print Advertisements On Popular Beverages

Metaphorical and metonymic thinking are two kinds of important cognitive manners,which are conductive to the development of human beings' cognition and minds.Print advertisements play a vital role in attracting audiences' attention and stimulating consumption.Recent years have witnessed a strong trend towards multimodal discourse,among which multimodal metaphor has received abundant attention.However,there are relatively few studies of metonymy and multimodal metonymy nowadays,let alone research aiming to interaction patterns between multimodal metaphor and metonymy.Therefore,based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,Multimodal Metaphor Theory and Aristotle's Three Rhetorical Modes of Persuasion,adopting qualitative and quantitative methods,this study intends to explore the interaction patterns of print advertisements on multimodal metaphor and metonymy and persuasive strategies.Furthermore,this study expounds its guiding role in the design and theme expression of print advertisements.Based on Pérez-Sobrino's(2017)integrated approach on interaction patterns between multimodal metaphor and metonymy,this study conducts a comparative study between Wanglaoji and Pepsi on their print advertisements.The results show that: 1)Metonymy in this corpus plays a relatively important role as metaphor does,thus supporting the potentiality to survey other alternative figurative operations.Metaphtonymy occupies the highest frequency of appearance and then followed by metonymy and metaphor.Meanwhile,Pepsi is more proficient in using conceptual figurative operations than Wanglaoji.2)There is some relationship between mode choices in the way metaphoric and metonymic domains presenting advertising message.And the vast majority of figurative operations are presented in the form of image or verbopictorial mode in both source and target domains.There is no apparent difference between Wanglaoji and Pepsi in the choice of mode.3)Persuasive strategies are ubiquitous in the advertising corpus of Wanglaoji and Pepsi with various types and there are similarities and differences between them due to their different cultural background.The study not only theoretically enriches the interactive research on multimodal metaphor and metonymy,but also is conducive to helping related companies properly make use of figurative operations and persuasive strategies to better design cognitively-effective and persuasive beverage print advertisements.